


Half of My Heart

by chucks_prophet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, And Completely Oblivious As Usual, Best Friends, Bisexuality, Break Up, Castiel and Dean Winchester in Love, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dean is a Good Friend, Dean is a Sweetheart, Dean's Top 13 Zepp Traxx Mixtape, Eventual Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, He's Also Wildly In Love With Castiel, Hopeful Ending, Indiana Jones References, Love Confessions, M/M, Past Castiel/April Kelly, Post-Break Up, References to Canon, Unconventional Love Confession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 07:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12271743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chucks_prophet/pseuds/chucks_prophet
Summary: Cas is brokenhearted, but it’s not so plain and simple.





	Half of My Heart

**Author's Note:**

> I've been feeling the need to express my sexuality more through my art and now it's transferred into my writing, because there's a little backstory about Dean coming to terms with it you'll read in this, and I just wanna say I'm proud to be bisexual, guys. And knowing one of my favourite characters, the same one who I relate to the most out of every character on the show, is bisexual just makes me <3333

Cas is brokenhearted, but it’s not so plain and simple.

There’s the heart that’s made of muscle and fluid and thrashes wildly against his ribcage like a bird slapping its wings against its cage in a desperate plea to escape captivity.

Then there’s the one in his hand, made of plastic. Unlike the heart made of muscle, this one has a visible tear down the middle and letters etched into the half in his possession. It’s the one word that, in a flash of a green light to a halting red, started and stopped everything. It’s the one word that gets the most twisted, misconstrued, and overused in the human dictionary; therefore making it quite possibly the most dangerous, too:

**Love.**

On the back of it are his initials, C.N. She has the other half  with her initials carved into the back. Considering she hasn’t given it back, it’s safe to say she doesn’t reciprocate the same feelings anymore.

"I couldn't find any of the other Indiana Jones movies, so the Temple of Doom will have to do."

Dean, his best friend, rushes in with enough pillows and blankets to make forts like they used to when they were kids—sitting atop it all, of course, Harrison Ford in a revealing beige button down that's better fit for a porno with the whip coiled up in his left hand.

And a fort doesn't sound too bad right now, except it won't hold up against the rain currently showering his face. Which is fine, he has no motivation to take a shower, anyway. It's not like he has hot dates to get to anymore.

"We'll just fast-forward through every scene Willie screams over a broken nail," he continues, onto another earth Cas is almost certain doesn't have as green of land as those in his eyes. "But man, her daughter. Capshaw, I mean. I never wanted to visit Arizona until I saw Grey's Anatomy... I mean... in passing, you know. Sammy binges it like a pro..."

8 months. It's not a very long time, but for Cas, being his first relationship, it's the perfect set-up for the cliché thing to say, which is that it felt like a lifetime. Eight months since a hot senior asked him, Castiel Novak, a junior and amateur virgin with an entry-level passion in cultural anthropology (hence why he was a virgin for so long), on a date.

She was his first time. And second. And third.

"I'm trying, man.”

The ocean water level rises as Cas’s eyes pan up to Dean. As hard as it is for Cas to even move, he has to let Dean know none of this is his fault. Hell, Dean actually thought the heart charm was _cheesy_ when Cas bought them.

“I know none of this’ll fix anything,” he says, plopping next to him into the bean bag chair. “But I just… I can’t… I _won’t_ see you like this. Not over someone who’s not worth it.”

Cas nods a little, casting his focus down again, to the charm in his hand. It’s so still in his room he can hear Dean breathing next to him. Cas takes a minute to count each inhale and exhale to both calm and distract himself from the self-depreciating thoughts in his head that are better compared to lumber thrown into an already raging bonfire, and Dean’s gaze on him, just like in his dreams.

He’s always braver in his dreams. Always ready to fuck consequences and do what he should’ve done four years ago when Dean came busting into Miss Moseley’s history class (something Miss Moseley was _not_ happy about, considering he’s one of John Winchester’s kids) and strode to the back of the room where Cas was, laying out a poster on his desk like he was Lewis and Clark and Cas was his Sacagawea asking for his help on an ad poster for the Archery Club. (Along with humans, Cas studies angels and Enochian language, which makes for neat calligraphy.)

Brave is a foreign word to him now. All he feels now is the absence of love and belonging, both being what made him brave.

“Can we…” Cas isn’t sure when he starts speaking, but his voice is small and when he looks up again, albeit shyly, he sees Dean still fixed on him. His thick pink lips are clamped tight, like his jaw. Cas finds his new focal point on Dean’s Adam apple, bobbing to collect the saliva pooling in his mouth. “Can we just lay here for a little while?”

He can tell Dean still has his reservations about Cas’s current state by the way he bites his lip, but he nods anyway. After a few minutes passing like sap dripping from the splintered body of a tree, Cas starts to burrow into Dean’s side, just underneath his armpit.  Dean extends his left arm after a minute, wrapping his hand around Cas’s shoulder to pull him to rest more comfortably on him. Cas settles against his chest, breathing in Dean’s musk as he does so, and breathes it back into his Zeppelin shirt.

Despite the charm burning in his hand, Cas just listens to Dean’s torso like his favorite song. His heartbeat is a little fast, but Cas chalks it up to his worry for him.

They lay this way for the duration of what they could’ve used watching the Temple of Doom.

 

***

Dean tries everything. And he means _everything_ to cheer Cas up the weeks following his breakup.

He tries offering him lunch at the best burger joint in town, on him, which is a bust, because once Cas gets home from school, he doesn’t move, and if Dean, all two hundred pounds of him (his stubbornness adds an extra fifty), can’t get him to budge, nothing can.

So from there, he figures if Cas is spending a lot more time inside, he’ll need an epic playlist, so he makes him a Top 13 mixtape. Now, he knows how cliché that sounds—especially how _romantically_ cliché that sounds. But it has been something he’s been putting off, because Cas, in his seventeen years on earth, hasn’t listened to a single Zeppelin song, and that’s just criminal.

The tape has everything from “Kashmir” to “Communication Breakdown” and he even risked putting “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” on there with a line like, _When so many loves go wrong, will our love go on and on and on and on and on and on?”_  Not that he _likes_ Cas like that, no.

No, because he _loves_ Cas like that.

It sort of all hit him at once, because he didn’t know he liked dudes until junior year—about a month before April asked Cas out. And he didn’t know a _certain_ dude prompted that realization until that same week she did, when he was going to tell Cas everything.

Eight months later and he still hasn’t gotten around to it. And when would it be appropriate, when Cas was clearly happy with April? His sexual epiphany didn’t come close to the epiphany Cas was experiencing for the first time. Though through gritted teeth, he was happy for his best friend.

He wonders how long he would have had to hide a big part of his life from Cas if he and April had gone on longer, though. A year, two years—longer? He would’ve gladly swallowed his feelings for Cas, but he has to eventually tell him about the brief stint with Benny Laffite a few months ago. Cas is his best friend, he’s the person he goes to with this stuff—stuff meaning everything.

Anyway, needless to say, the mixtape is an even bigger bust because Cas tries giving it back to him, thinking Dean gave it to him to borrow, and Dean had to swallow an even bigger lump in his throat because that means Cas didn’t even like “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp”.

But he moves on. He buys Cas new anthropology books (which, granted it’s a small town, earned Dean some weird looks from people who know him as a straight C student), he brings over board games and the Stooges and premade fortune tellers with silly fates to pass the time, he shows him really embarrassing pictures of himself when he was young that he doesn’t even let Sam see, all in desperate attempts that he’ll crack even the smallest of smiles. But nothing works.

A few days later, it hits him. He knows exactly how to mend Cas’s broken heart.

***

Cas and Dean have been friends so long, Cas knows his knock anywhere. “Come in,” he says, loud enough so that he doesn’t have to strain himself more than he already has the past few weeks. And his mom can’t say he hasn’t cleaned his room. A couple days ago, there was a landfill of tissues surrounding Cas on his bed, so that counts for something.

“Hey,” Dean says, and the way he’s leaning against the doorway sheepishly with his right hand behind his back has Cas mildly intrigued.

Cas moves his head to the side a little. “Um… hey. Are you okay?”

With the plaintive look that flashes across Dean’s face Cas can tell that’s the wrong thing to ask, because that’s the one thought that’s probably been running through Dean’s mind for nearly a month about him.

And what can Cas say? He can’t lie and say he’s fine; he owes Dean more than that. But he also still can’t bring himself to express exactly what he’s been feeling. So he’s just been silent except when he can’t be, trying to process everything still.

“Yeah, no, I’m peachy,” Dean responds, shaking his head with a small laugh. Dean has an amazing laugh, it’s a little breathy and hits all the way to the back of his throat, making his voice sound even deeper, and when he laughs really hard, it comes out a wheeze. Cas would give his own happiness, if he had any left at the moment, to hear it. “I have something for you.”

Cas can tell he’s still nervous, so he takes the kind of initiative Dean has these last few weeks to sit up straighter on his bed as Dean approaches him with his right arm now extended. In his hand is a small blue box, like something you’d keep for a small piece of jewelry. Cas looks up at Dean, asking silently for permission. Dean visibly takes a breath and nods.

Cas tears his gaze from Dean to focus on the box. With the gentleness of a feather, he opens the top.  Once he does, it takes him a moment to catch his own breath, because it can’t be: “Oh my God.”

He holds up the piece, the other half of the silver heart that reads _you_ , and when he flips it over, he sees not A.K., but D.W.

That’s when it hits him. “ _Oh my God,”_ he repeats, his heart picking up in his chest. He shoots his head up to Dean, who’s laughing a little more nervously, but the sincerity in his eyes is there. “You—?”

“Crazy, right?” Dean replies with a shaky smirk.

And that does it: For the first time in nearly a month, Cas smiles, gums and all.

 

 

It’s the word that gets the most twisted, misconstrued, and overused in the human dictionary; therefore making it quite possibly the most dangerous, too.

But he trusts when Dean says it.

 

 


End file.
